With this latest release, the user interface for Anaconda, Fedora’s installation software, has been re-written. According to the announcement, the re-designed UI makes installation easier for new users, but advanced users and administrators will still be able to take advantage of more complex options. The look and feel also has been streamlined to provide cleaner and more modern visuals during the installation process. For upgrades, Fedora has switched to a new tool called FedUp (Fedora Upgrader).

Fedora 18 features Gnome 3.6, Cinnamon, and the MATE desktop. The system also includes updated KDE Plasma Workspaces and the 4.10 version of the Xfce desktop. For developers, new tooling packages have been added, including the Lisp dialect Clojure, the Leinengen build tool, Clojure libraries, assorted development frameworks, and the DragonEgg plugin for GCC compilers.

Cloud and virtualization features in Fedora 18 include the Eucalyptus platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, OpenStack Folsom, and Heat – an OpenStack project for the orchestration of cloud applications using the AWS CloudFormation template format.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system is distributed free of charge, and you can download it from: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora. To install Fedora 18, you’ll need: A blank CD or DVD or a blank 1GB+ USB stick, a 400MHz or faster processor, at least 768 MB memory (1GB recommended), and at least 10GB hard drive space (only required for installation).